Desolation and despair in Libya: the murder of Salwa Bugaighis

Looking back, it feels as if Salwa Bugaighis embodied not
the hopes and aspirations of the majority of her country's people but a dream of
revolution, shared by a minority of educated Libyans and nurtured by western
journalists and democracy activists, says Lindsey Hilsum

Occasionally you meet someone who embodies the hopes and aspirations of a
country. The Libyan human rights lawyer Salwa Bugaighis, 50, seemed like such a
person when I met her at the beginning of the Libyan revolution in 2011. Her
murder inside her home in Libya's second city, Benghazi, on June 25th, has
tipped many Libyans from depression into despair.

“I’m trying so hard not to hate, but don't have anything today but feelings of
loss and anger at those who are killing our best," said fellow democracy
activist, Huda Abuzeid. "I'm beyond devastated and tired of crying.”

Salwa Bugaighis was the most prominent of the small group of lawyers who
protested against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime in front of Benghazi's north
courthouse in February 2011. Taking their cue from the fall of President
Mubarak next door in Egypt, other Libyans also took to the streets across the
east of the country and so the revolution that toppled Gaddafi was born.

Salwa and her sister, Iman, an orthodontist, were noticeable not simply because
they were women, but also because they did not wear the headscarf. Salwa
dressed modestly but with a slash of bright lipstick, a distinctive figure in the
crowd. She and her husband, Issam, a psychologist, spoke English, and were
happy to talk to the dozens of western journalists and human rights workers who
rushed to eastern Libya.

"You could feel the force field around her," said Sidney Kwiram who
worked for Human Rights Watch in Benghazi in 2011. "She swept through the
hallways, a mix of conviction and glamour."

Salwa was determined that the revolution should not repeat the horrors of the
Gaddafi regime. When revolutionary militiamen began rounding up African
migrants, accusing them without evidence of being mercenaries for Gaddafi, she
went directly to the prison and persuaded
the self-appointed guards to set them free.

Salwa had been building up to the revolution all her life. Her father, the
anti-Gaddafi activist Saad Bugaighis, lived in exile in the USA for 30 years,
so his daughters were brought up by their mother. It was a political family,
where girls were encouraged to be more independent and westernised than most
Benghazi women.

As a law student in the 1980s, Salwa was suspended for a year from Garyounis
University in Benghazi for opposing Gaddafi. It was a mild punishment.

When Seif al Gaddafi, the dictator's son, started a gradual process of
liberalisation in 2004 Salwa and her fellow lawyers campaigned for political
prisoners, including the families of those murdered in the notorious Abu Salim prison massacre
of 1996.

"Seif wanted to open the door just a little bit, so we went straight
through," she said.

From the beginning of the revolution, Salwa was determined that women should
not be sidelined.

“Salwa was one of the first women I met in Benghazi in those naive days when we
thought being brave and good was what it was going to take," said Huda
Abuzeid. "She was always present at those early demonstrations where she
would march at the front and whisper to me: 'we're not going to let them put us
at the back or in separate lines'.”

As a member of the Transitional
National Council, the body that ran eastern Libya, Salwa played a role in
presenting the revolution to the outside world while Gaddafi's forces held onto
Tripoli. She and Iman strongly backed the NATO air strikes that led to the
overthrow of Gadaffi.

"It will benefit the international community to support us," said
Iman. "We will be a democratic country that respects minorities and human
rights."

Almost immediately after the fall of Gaddafi, that ideal began to crumble.
Women were the first victims as male politicians jockeyed for power and
Islamists tightened their grip on society. Salwa stepped down from the TNC.

"Iman and I were very effective in the beginning but the men didn't
believe that women could play a role at this time," she told me at the end
of 2011 when I saw her in Tripoli. "They didn't think we had the strength,
background or ability."

She established a civil society protest camp in Benghazi, went on a monitoring
mission to see the Tunisian elections, and campaigned against corruption and
lack of transparency in Libya's increasingly chaotic politics.

"Getting freedom doesn't mean reaching democracy," she said.

Indeed it didn't. Militias, armed with weapons looted from Gadaffi's
overstuffed armouries, fought each other, avenged old grievances, and preyed on
the population while Libya's inexperienced politicians held futile meetings and
passed decrees that everyone ignored.

Salwa joined a committee to encourage national dialogue and considered running
for office, but by 2012 violent jihadis were rampaging across eastern Libya.
They assassinated scores of Gaddafi era military officers and, on September
11th 2012, the US Consul in Benghazi, Chris Stevens.
Salwa marched with his picture at a protest against the killers - this was not
the Libya she had fought for.

Her husband, Issam, was elected onto Benghazi City Council but the couple
received constant death threats from the jihadis who hated both democracy activists
and women in public life. ("Democracy is blasphemy" read one slogan.)
After a kidnap attempt on their son, Wael, they sent him and his two brothers
to school in Jordan. As the situation deteriorated throughout 2013, they too
spent months in the relative safety of Tripoli and out of the country.

But Salwa and Issam could not bring themselves to abandon Libya entirely.

"When we asked her if she had thought of leaving the country for some
time, like many of her fellow countrymen and women, or whether she ever
considered taking a back seat while things seemingly unravelled for the worse,
she answered, “How can I do this? I was there from the beginning – this is what
I believe in! I will continue until the end,” wrote
her nieces, Lina and Rima.

On June 25th, Libya held parliamentary elections. Less than half the eligible
voters turned out - disillusion has set in as none of the elections in Libya
since the revolution has produced an effective leadership or curbed the
violence. Nonetheless, Salwa and Issam went back to Benghazi to vote. It was,
to them, the reason they had sacrificed so much. Salwa posted on Facebook a
picture of herself putting her ballot in the box and gave an interview to a
local TV station.

Maybe that was what alerted the gunmen that the couple were back in town. That
evening, five armed masked men shot the guard at the gate to the compound and
forced their way into the house. They shot Salwa in the head and stabbed her to
death. Issam is still missing, believed kidnapped. God only knows what horrors
he has been through, and whether we will ever know his fate.

No-one, least of all Salwa, thought that Libya would leap from dictatorship to
democracy overnight, but she - and we - hoped at least that a functioning state
with some basic freedoms could be constructed from the ruin Gaddafi created.

Looking back, it feels as if Salwa Bugaighis embodied not the hopes and
aspirations of the majority of her country's people but a dream of revolution,
shared by a minority of educated Libyans and nurtured by western journalists
and democracy activists. We believed because we wanted to, but our hopes went
against the historical tide. Those like Salwa who accelerate ahead of history
must perish.

After Salwa's death, a few dozen Libyans gathered in Tripoli's Algeria Square
for what might have been a protest or a wake. On Facebook and Twitter they said
that her death must not be in vain, and it was their duty to carry on her
struggle. They are brave but it is hard to see them as anything but deluded.

Libya is entering a dark age of jihadism and anarchy that may last for many
years. Colonel Gadaffi left a vacuum where the state should be, now filled with
violent men and Islamist fanatics. Across the Middle East, authoritarian
regimes are reasserting themselves - witness Egypt and Syria - while weak
states such as Iraq and Libya are falling prey to obscurantist, violent
jihadis. This is a time in the history of the Middle East and North Africa that
has no space for the values that Salwa Bugaighis represented.

In October 2011, as I wandered round the rubble and burnt out buildings in
Gadaffi's hometown of Sirte, after he was torn limb from limb by a mob of revolutionaries,
I thought of Tacitus writing about the defeat of the Britons by the Romans:
"They created a desolation and called it peace."

Only in Libya today, after the death of Salwa Bugaighis, there is not even
peace, just the desolation revolution has brought in its wake.

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